Citizen Reader

Briefly this year I toyed with the idea of signing up for Goodreads, because Readers I love and trust tell me it's a handy site for tracking their reading.

But Goodreads is owned by Amazon and therefore I don't want to touch it. I mean, I don't think jerkiness is catching, but the less I have to do with Jeff Bezos, the better.

So I'm going to keep listing what I read here, just because I'm getting increasingly old and sometimes it's nice to have a record of what one has read. And what I read last month was journalist Glenn Greenwald's investigative book No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Now, I love Edward Snowden, as I love all whistleblowers, and I'm neutral on Glenn Greenwald, although I like journalists who work with whistleblowers as well. But I just did not find that book this interesting. Although he does eventually get around to explaining some of the information Snowden revealed, and why it was so shocking, that seemed to be buried in the middle of the book. A lot of the first hundred pages dealt mainly with how Snowden found Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras and identified them as the individuals he wanted to publish the documents he could provide. It's interesting in its own way, but mainly it's just too much Greenwald. Although I did enjoy how honest Greenwald was about how lazy he was when first contacted by the source who would turn out to be Snowden; basically, Greenwald couldn't be bothered to set up encrypted email, even though the source tried to teach him how to do it. Now, I couldn't do it either, but I am also not a world-class investigative journalist. Seemed a little weak.

In the meantime I would still like to see the movie Citizenfour, about Snowden. Has anyone seen it? I also want to re-watch his interview with John Oliver.